AD Classics: Centre Georges Pompidou / Richard Rogers + Renzo Piano | ArchDaily AD Classics: Centre Georges Pompidou / Richard Rogers + Renzo Piano AD Classics: Centre Georges Pompidou / Richard Rogers + Renzo Piano 01:00 - 11 June, 2010 19 Rue Beaubourg 75004 Paris, Francia Architects conservapedia.com , Courtney Traub , NJIT , Francis Toussaint From the architect. In the 1970's architects Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, both unknown at the time, collaborated and erected one of the most famous and radical buildings of our time, Centre Georges Pompidou. The cultural center in Paris , France turned our world inside out, literally. It all began with Georges Pompidou, President of France from 1969 to 1974, who wanted to construct a cultural center in Paris that would attract visitors and be a monumental aspect of the city. Receiving more than 150 million visitors since is completion thirty three years ago, there is no doubt that Pompidou's vision became a successful reality. More information on Centre Georges Pompidou after the break.

In order to choose the architects for the project, the president held a competition and many entered, including some of the most famous architects in France at the time. People were astonished, however, when the design of Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, both not famous at the time, won the competition. Their entry exemplified constructivism and was a high-tech modern cultural center structured with a system gerberettes and trusses unlike anything seen in the architectural world before. Their concept, depicted in one of their competition drawings as a collage, was portraying the museum itself as movement. The other concept in their design, and perhaps the most obvious, was exposing all of the infrastructure of the building. The skeleton itself engulfs the building from its exterior, showing all of the different mechanical and structure systems not only so that they could be understood but also to maximize the interior space without interruptions. Save this picture! © Courtney Traub The different systems on the exterior of the building are painted different colors to distinguish their different roles.

The structure and largest ventilation components were painted white, stairs and elevator structures were painted a silver gray, ventilation was painted blue, plumbing and fire control piping painted green, the electrical elements are yellow and orange, and the elevator motor rooms and shafts, or the elements that allow for movement throughout the building, are painted red. One of the "movement" elements that the center is most known for is the escalator (painted red on the bottom) on the west facade, a tube that zigzags up to the top of the building providing visitors with an astonishing view of the city of Paris. Save this picture! © NJIT The Centre Pompidou houses the Musée National d'Art Moderne, which is Europe's largest museum for modern art. Also located in the vast open interior is the Bibliothèque publique d'information, a huge public library, and a center for music and acoustic research known as IRCAM. The flat open site upon which it is located is a constant exterior stage for urban events. The centre was officially opened on January 31, 1977 and has since then integrated high-tech architecture and urbanism as a movement and spectacle for the city to experience everyday. Save this picture!

Centre Pompidou-Metz, © Flickr: User - Eric Schoendorf On May 12, 2010 the sister of Centre Georges Pompidou, named Centre Pompidou-Metz, opened its doors in Metz, France. The building was designed by Shigeru Ban and Jean de Gastines. The building is a museum for modern and contemporary art and was designed to resemble a traditional Chinese hat, forcing function to follow form. It incorporates innovative carpentry in its structure composed of sixteen kilometers of glued laminated timber that intersect to form a hexagonal mesh. For more information on the new center visit the Centre Pompidou-Metz official website. © conservapedia.com Centre Pompidou Paris by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers Simon Glynn 2001 How to visit Enter by the plaza, place Georges-Pompidou (but still known by its previous name, place Beaubourg). To get there, take the Metro to Rambuteau (line 11) or H�tel de Ville (lines 1 and 11); or take the RER (suburban train) to Ch�telet/Les Halles.

There is paid parking in both rue Beaubourg and rue des Halles. Comprehensive visitor information, including opening times, is available in English at the web site of the Centre national d'art et de culture at . All links outside galinsky will open in a new window. Close it when you've finished, or use the Window menu on your browser, to return to galinsky. The Shard: Renzo Piano's great glass elevator | Art and design | The Guardian Architecture The Shard: Renzo Piano's great glass elevator It has transformed the London skyline, but the giant Shard faced hostility all the way. Its Italian architect Renzo Piano meets Steve Rose on the eighth floor – and answers his critics ‘It’s not about priapismo’ … the Shard, at 310m the EU’s tallest building. Photograph: Matt Crossick/EMPICS Entertainment Architecture The Shard: Renzo Piano's great glass elevator It has transformed the London skyline, but the giant Shard faced hostility all the way.

Its Italian architect Renzo Piano meets Steve Rose on the eighth floor – and answers his critics Wednesday 13 June 2012 13.43 EDT First published on Wednesday 13 June 2012 13.43 EDT Share on Messenger Close The storm clouds have been gathering over the Shard ever since it was announced, 11 years ago. Now that the building has reached its full height, it has inevitably become a lightning rod. Few structures in Britain have so dominated the skyline or the architectural debate. To its opponents, it has stabbed London in the heart: it is too tall, it destroys the scale of the city, it disrupts historic views, it is in the wrong place, it is a waste of energy – a monument to greed, money, inequality, foreign influence and broken Britain. To its supporters, however, it is a jolt of the modern – the moment London truly joined the 21st century. Appropriately, on the day its architect Renzo Piano meets me there, the clouds have all but engulfed the building. On a clear day, apparently, you can see 60 miles from the top. This isn't one of them.

Even from the eighth floor, the riverbank opposite is a blur, obscured by fog and a cascade of rainwater running all the way down the sloping windows from the 87th floor. But Piano seems impervious to both the weather and the lightning bolts of criticism. Tall, elegant, relaxed and mellifluously spoken, the 74-year-old Italian looks every bit the internationally renowned architect. Well, almost. Beneath his raincoat, he's wearing a T-shirt with a pink slogan. "Trust me, I'm an architect," it says. "There's a moment when you need to trust," Piano smiles, pointing at his shirt. "Because you can't predict everything. You cannot prove mathematically that what you're doing is going to work. But you have to be bloody sure – because if you do something like this wrong, it's wrong for centuries." He told the judge the same thing during the public inquiry into its planning. "And I was keeping my fingers crossed in my pocket," he says. The inquiry approved the Shard on the strength of its exceptional design.

Realising he had a golden opportunity to build something super-tall, the developer Irvine Sellar had been advised to get a highly credible architect after his first proposal, by Broadway Malyan , was mauled by the press. He appears to have trusted Piano a great deal. The tapering, faceted form of the Shard, referencing London's history of spires and masts, was quickly agreed upon. Piano also suggested what to put inside : a mix of office space on the lower floors, a hotel in the middle, and apartments above. It was Piano who recommended it be open to the public, via a viewing gallery at the top and three floors of restaurants a third of the way up. Piano even christened the building, likening it to "a glass shard" at a press conference. "It is not difficult to make a new shape," he says. "Even children can do that. What is difficult is to make new shape that makes sense." Click for a 360-degree view from the Shard Crystalline structures entranced such early modernists as Germany's Bruno Taut, whose 1914 Glass Pavilion was adorned with such utopian slogans as "Glass brings a new era" and "Light wants crystal".

Yet, where most glass towers are basic geometric forms, the Shard, which officially opens next month, achieves something more sculptural. Its giant sides fold and overlap, creating fissures and niches; what's more, being angled, they reflect the sky, fragmenting the building's scale and turning it, says Piano, into "a mirror of London – on a sunny day, it is fantastic". On a grey day like today, however, the poetry is not quite so apparent, and its hulking mass is impossible to disguise.The faceted form breaks up the scale inside, too. Floors of offices, with their central elevators and glass-lined perimeters, can all look very much alike, but the Shard's irregular floor plans create something less regimented. And, instead of corner offices for managers to hog, there are "winter gardens" with openable windows. The fissured sides also conceal ventilation grilles and service openings, from which cranes can emerge like robotic arms to clean and maintain the building. As for the environmental drawbacks of an all-glass tower, which can heat up like a greenhouse, they are less relevant in Britain's temperate climate.

The chief complaint with the Shard , though, is not the building's design or technical performance, but its location. It's fine, say critics, for Dubai or Hong Kong – but why did it have to go here? It's difficult to deny that the Shard is out of scale with the low-rise streets around it, or that it ruins the view of St Paul's Cathedral from Parliament Hill . But then London has never been a precious, historic jewel of a city like Venice or Paris: it has grown haphazardly, been scarred by war and fire, and has continually overwritten its own history. That's not to say there is no place for heritage, but the balance is a dynamic one. London is still in flux. St Paul's once looked out of scale, but it has now been dwarfed by the high-rises of the City; the Shard's context will also change. And, just across the Thames, stands the concrete core of Rafael Viñoly's upcoming 37-storey "Walkie Talkie" , potentially an uglier and more obtrusive design than Piano's. "This building is not made with the intention to be aggressive or powerful," says Piano. "It is not about priapismo.

This building is telling a completely different story. It is celebrating a shift – in the idea that growth in a city should not happen by building more and more on the periphery. This city is one of the first that decided to have a green belt , a clear physical limit; if you have to grow, you grow inside. I'm not an advocate of tall buildings, but I am an advocate of intensifying the city from the inside." And yes, says Piano, it had to go here. The Shard may be, at almost 310m, the tallest building in the EU, yet it has just 48 parking spaces – the point being that it sits right by London Bridge station, a major transport hub. "It's another big shift – to tell people, 'Look, stop going around in cars.' In this city, it's less terrible, but try to do this in Milan. Try to do this in Paris, Los Angeles. Would you expect hostility? Of course. You have to accept as an architect to be exposed to criticism. Architecture should not rely on full harmony. If everyone is agreeing, then you make a big mistake." Reading this on mobile? Click here to view Piano has weathered greater hostility than this.

His career began, after all, with one of the most provocative buildings in modern architecture: 1977's Pompidou Centre in Paris , which he and Richard Rogers designed in their 30s. In terms of language, if not height, the Pompidou is still far more radical than the Shard. A lightweight box covered in ducts and pipes, it defied the notion that cultural architecture should be solid, monumental, intimidating. Critical opposition was virtually unanimous and legal action was taken to try to stop it going ahead. "I'm still surprised we were allowed," he smiles. "We were bad boys. We were teenagers. Worse than teenagers – we were Beatles!" There's a touch of Yellow Submarine to the Pompidou, he admits, but that was the spirit of the age. This was the early 1970s, when Piano was at London's Architectural Association, hanging out with sci-fi technophiles such as the Archigram team . He fell in easily with the Italian-speaking Rogers. "Richard was more intellectual, more brilliant," says Piano.

"I was more like a bricoleur [handyman]." Despite the shock of the Pompidou, Piano's work has since followed a serene, craftsmanlike path, true to his family's roots in construction. His practice is called Renzo Piano Building Workshop and his Genoa HQ has been likened to a spiritual retreat. He has, however, no obvious signature style: the best of his work seeks refined harmony rather than virtuosic display. His many art galleries defer to the work rather than make "iconic" statements. His New York Times skyscraper , in contrast to the Shard, goes almost too far in its reticence, appearing grey and anonymous from a distance. But Piano has never stopped being radical. In the 1990s, he designed an airport terminal, a spectacular 2km long, on a giant artificial island in Japan's Osaka Bay. He concealed San Francisco's California Academy of Sciences beneath an undulating roof of grass and plants . He is working on a skyscraper in South Korea that is twice the height of the Shard (and will doubtless attract half the controversy).

And the most contentious of all his works has probably been the least radical: adding a new monastery and gatehouse to Le Corbusier's celebrated chapel in Ronchamp, France . Several high-profile architects signed a petition denouncing such interference with an architectural treasure. "In every interesting job," says Piano, "you are there not to change the world, but to witness the change in the world." So the Shard is merely a manifestation of the hard choices growing cities have to make. "You do not get hostility because you are wrong, but because people have a fear of change. Around any job, you can always build a good story and a bad story.

And the hostility goes away – because if you are right, then the good story comes out." The tower, designed by Renzo Piano, will contain offices, exclusive residences, a hotel, restaurants and a viewing gallery Published: 5 Jul 2012 11,000 glass panels, 44 lifts and a public gallery 309.6 metres above London – the lowdown on Europe's tallest building Published: 5 Jul 2012 At almost £25 a ticket to go up western Europe's tallest building, there are cheaper ways to get a view of London, writes Jon Henley Published: 5 Jul 2012 The tallest building in western Europe, the Shard, is unveiled in a spectacular laser light show in south London Published: 6 Jul 2012 Richard Rogers / Richard Rogers + Architects – From the House to the City : - Design/Designer Information Richard Rogers + Architects – From the House to the City 24 April – 25 August 2008 One of the most influential British architects of our time, RICHARD ROGERS (1933-) has established himself and his practice, Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, at the forefront

 of today’s architecture industry through such high-profile projects as the Pompidou Centre, the headquarters for Lloyds of London, the Millennium Dome, and Madrid Barajas Airport.

Three decades, and two comprehensive makeovers after it was finished, the Pompidou Centre has survived its moment at the edge of architectural fashion, and proved itself to be one of the most remarkable buildings of the 20th century. The shock value of its colour-coded plumbing and its exhibitionist structure has not faded with the years. But while it was regarded as an ugly onslaught on Paris by the traditionalists when it was built, it is now seen for what it is – an enormous achievement, technically and conceptually. A more subtle criticism at the time was voiced by Alan Colquhoun, once Richard Rogers’ tutor, who described it as fatally lacking a ‘face’. And it is true that Rogers and his co-designer Renzo Piano did not use architecture to represent the Pompidou Centre’s cultural role. But when the Pompidou was young, its cheerful technological optimism, and its good-hearted embrace of its urban context proved enormously popular with the public. It served almost single-handedly to inject the idea of radical modernism back onto the agenda, after what can only be described as a crisis of confidence in the architectural profession triggered by the evaporation of the dream of a modernist utopia with the demolition of scores of troublesome teenage tower blocks.

The image of the Pompidou pervaded popular culture in the 1970s, making appearances on album covers and as a table lamp – and even acting as the set for a Bond film. It did much to overcome the hermetic nature of the architectural culture of its time, moving outside the professional ghetto to appeal to a wider audience both stylistically and in its content. Less appealingly, it triggered an explosion of high-tech styling, characterised by derivative perforated metal and exposed structural bracing. It was, in short, a sensation, in much the same way that Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim museum in Bilbao was to become at the end of the 1990s. Rogers was only 38 when he and Piano won the competition to design a new cultural centre for Paris in the old market district. Afterwards he claimed that he had to be talked into it, because he believed that there was little chance that the French government would be interested in building anything radical. Philip Johnson and Jean Prouvé were the two jury members who argued most persuasively for Piano + Rogers’ anonymously submitted design that seemed to derive in equal parts from the Futurists, and from Archigram.

It was certainly like no previous museum with its plans for an infinitely flexible interior that not only had movable walls, but floors that could also be adjusted up or down – a feature that did not in the end survive the process of turning the competition drawings into a real building. In other ways, however, the finished building demonstrated a remarkable degree of refinement – of craftsmanship even – in the way the original diagram was transformed into superbly detailed structural elements. It was this quality which, according to some critics, suggested that the Pompidou should be seen as closer to the Victorian engineering tradition than the space age. Certainly, it reflected some of the lessons that Rogers had learned from his childhood Meccano set. The Pompidou catapulted Rogers from the obscurity of a small practice on to a world stage. But he showed a marked reluctance to use the opportunity to transform his practice into a large scale architectural organisation in the way that his former partner Norman Foster was to do.

He spent nearly five years in Paris building the Pompidou – or the Beaubourg as it was called at first by those, like Rogers, who were reluctant to see the structure associated so closely with its namesake, the right-wing politician who was seen as responsible for stamping out the insurrectionary outburst of May 1968. Then Rogers went back to London, and found that the work had run out. Salvation came in the unlikely form of the insurance brokers, Lloyd’s of London. Rogers, practising without Piano, won another competition, to replace the existing headquarters of Lloyd’s with a new structure that took the technological expressionism of the Pompidou Centre to its extreme. Lloyds of London has a concrete structure, unlike the Pompidou Centre which is built in steel. Despite the apparent similarities with its predecessor, it is inspired as much by a determination to work with the visual grain of the city, rather than to be read as an alien intrusion. The staircases, lift towers and lavatories have been extracted from the interior, and placed in expressed towers and shafts on the exterior. They reflect the US architect Louis Kahn’s idea of buildings divided into ‘served and servant’ spaces.

The notional justification is practical: it leaves floors open and uncluttered. Equally important is the picturesque effect that this arrangement makes possible. Indeed it is hard to imagine a more traditional project, despite Rogers’ association with modernity. Lloyd’s of London is a tailor-made building designed as the city centre headquarters of an owner-occupier. It is the architectural equivalent of a Savile Row suit, with an eccentric cut, perhaps, but still essentially part of architectural high culture, while its truly ‘modern’ counterpart would be a speculative office slab on the edge of town. With the completion of Lloyd’s of London, Rogers became involved with the exploration of urban issues. He began to work on master planning as well as individual buildings. And he pursued his left-wing instincts, to play an active role in politics. He became a Labour peer. In the wake of Tony Blair’s victory in the 1997 general election, Rogers was – in political terms – the best-connected British architect in two generations. Rogers set out to use his skills to shape government policy on the shape of the city.

He guided the government‘s Urban Task Force, which set out an agenda for rescuing the cities from decay, advocating densification to revitalise them, and using brown field sites, rather than sacrificing yet more green land to suburban sprawl. Rogers found his political experiences frustrating, and became openly critical of some government policies, but persevered, and moved on to play a key role as the Mayor of London’s architectural advisor. At the same time he was working on larger and larger projects, including Terminal 5 at Heathrow Airport, the Antwerp Law Courts, a new terminal for Madrid Barajas Airport and a tower for the site of the World Trade Center in New York. Richard Rogers was born in Florence in 1933 of Anglo-Italian parents. His cousin was Ernesto Rogers, the celebrated Italian architect. Rogers graduated from the Architectural Association in 1959, the year after Peter Cook and the other members of what was to become Archigram arrived. In 1961, while completing his education by taking a postgraduate planning course at Yale under the direction of Serge Chermayeff, where James Stirling was a visiting critic, he met a fellow British student Norman Foster.

It was on the face of it an unlikely friendship. Foster was born in Manchester, into a family in which, as he puts it, going to university, or becoming an architect never seemed a possibility. In 1963 they set up a practice called Team 4, which lasted until 1967. It was composed of Rogers and his first wife Su Brumwell, Foster and his first wife, Wendy. It was the start of a decade which was to see an unprecedented questioning of the traditional norms of English society. Hedonism and the construction of a new social order were the priorities. Rogers immersed himself to the full in this ferment, and even today, as a member of the House of Lords, the ideas which inform the management of his practice owe a great deal to it. Yet Team 4’s first project was a highly traditional commission for young architects embarking on a career: a house for relatives. They were asked to design a home for Su Rogers’ parents, Marcus and Irene Brumwell in Cornwall. The Brumwells sold a Mondrian painting they had bought from the artist in the 1930s, to pay for it.

The house is a tour de force, half buried into the contours of its magnificent coastal site. There are few signs of the preoccupation of both Rogers and Foster with lightweight prefabricated buildings. Indeed the slate floors and exposed concrete block work have a certain monumentality. The project that really enforced the two architects’ claim to attention was the Reliance Controls building in Swindon. Completed in 1967, just before the partnership was dissolved, it combined the taught elegant exposed steel of Charles Eames with an interest in social issues unusual for the time, abolishing the distinctions between management and workforce by creating shared entrances and canteens. In 1971, Rogers went into partnership with Renzo Piano, an architect from Genoa who shared his taste for the radical applications of technology and, as they saw it, it's liberating potential. “Technology cannot be an end in itself, but must aim at solving long-term social and ecological problems�? wrote Rogers at the time. “This is impossible in a world where short-term profit for the ‘haves’ is seen as a goal at the expense of developing more efficient technology for the ‘have nots’�?.

Thirty years later, he found himself struggling to persuade the mayor of Shanghai not to stamp out the bicycle, only to conclude that only China could make such decisions for itself. In the end, Rogers’ greatest contribution to architecture has not been in creating a technological image, as the Pompidou seemed to suggest, but in emphasising the social and urban dimension of architecture, as well as in their sometimes brilliant synthesis with detail and structure to create architecture with a powerfully inventive character. © Design Museum + British Council Look what Renzo Piano has squeezed into Paris | Architecture | Agenda | Phaidon Look what Renzo Piano has squeezed into Paris Look what Renzo Piano has squeezed into Paris Piano's building for film company Pathé snakes in between the façades of the XIII arrondissement The Pathé Foundation, Paris, by Renzo Piano Building Workshop SHARE THIS PAGE The Pritzker-Prize laureate has been shortlisted to build an additional six hectares out into the sea Article Tools A · A Renzo Piano might forever be best known in Paris for the Pompidou Centre, which he designed in the 1970s with fellow architect Richard Rogers, but his recent projects in the capital are also turning heads.

In particular, Renzo Piano Building Workshop has almost completed a fantastic new tubular, glass-clad structure squeezed between two more conventional buildings, which will serve as an archive and heritage centre for the famous French film company, Pathé. The Pathé Foundation, Paris, by Renzo Piano Building Workshop The building has been constructed in the centre of a block in Paris’ XIII arrondissement, and is topped with an elliptical dome, held in place by timber beams. The architects at RPBW describe it as “an unexpected presence, a curved volume glimpsed floating in the middle of a courtyard, anchored on just a few supports”. It will house the new headquarters of the Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé, along with its not inconsiderable film archive, as well as exhibition spaces for temporary and permanent collections, a 70-seat screening room and the foundation's offices. Yet, despite this striking form, passers-by will find it hard to catch sight of this striking zoomorphic edifice. It is positioned on the Avenue des Gobelins behind a restored 19th century façade, bedecked with sculptures by a young Auguste Rodin.

The Pathé Foundation, Paris, by Renzo Piano Building Workshop Piano, architect of London’s Shard, of course, claims that the organic-shaped ‘creature’ is no starchitect’s whim, but rather a considered and practical solution to a tricksy site. “The peculiar design of this building is determined by the limits and requirements of the site,” his practice explains. “While keeping its distance from the surrounding buildings, the new building actually improves its neighbours’ access to daylight and air and by reducing the building’s footprint, the project creates space for a garden at the back of the site.” The Pathé Foundation, Paris, by Renzo Piano Building Workshop Centre Pompidou THE BRITS WHO BUILT THE MODERN WORLD Centre Pompidou 1977 Location Out of the 681 entries to a 1971 international competition for a new cultural building in Paris, it was the radical design of Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers that was chosen, a win that came as a surprise even to the architects themselves.

The idea of buildings being flexible and spaces infinitely able to be reconfigured to suit new conditions (seen in later buildings such as Rogers’s Lloyds building in London) had its genesis in the pioneering Pompidou, originally known as Centre Beaubourg. The architects’ aim was to turn the site of a rundown car park, vacant since the 1930s, into an information centre with public space for the people, where a new type of art space could be experienced by those alienated by the traditional museum or art gallery. …it is the most stunning new ‘go-to’ to be seen in any city Made up of prefabricated industrial components, the five 48-metre by 170-metre floor plates are uninterrupted by structural columns or services and can be adapted for new uses using temporary walls and partitions. The exterior envelope is a steel and glass curtain wall, obscured from the street by a layer of services ie, tubes that hold the circulation spaces and supporting exterior steel frame. This allows for clear floor spaces inside the centre.

So instead of the electronic message boards and TV screens on the outside that featured in the original design, animation comes from people walking in the corridors and the movement of the often crowded escalators running diagonally on the façade. The Centre is a fantastic object in its own right: expressive, colourful, complex, the realization of Modern Movement visions of the building as machine Horizontal services run under the floor or in the ceiling; all vertical elements run on the outside across the longest façades on the east and west, where circulation spaces or colourful service ducts scale the height of the Pompidou alongside the structural columns and braces. At the shorter south and north sides, the structure is expressed by the trusses supporting each floor. Below ground is space for car parking and storage. Despite criticisms, budget cuts and political interference, with the help of their team Piano and Rogers saw the project through to completion with their original ideas intact: a piazza, a place for people to enjoy, flexible interior spaces and a simple light structure. The result is one of Paris’s most popular and enjoyed attractions and it redefined what a museum could be.

QUOTES ABOUT Centre pompidou “…it is the most stunning new ‘go-to’ to be seen in any city.” Architectural Review, May 1977, p.272 “…the idea of people enjoying the building was always central to the concept…” Kenneth Powell in Richard Rogers Complete Works - Vol 1 , 1999, p.118 “The Centre is a fantastic object in its own right: expressive, colourful, complex, the realization of Modern Movement visions of the building as machine.” Kenneth Powell in Richard Rogers Complete Works - Vol 1, 1999, p.118-129 Pompidou Centre Paris - Building - e-architect Published by Isabelle Lomholt updated on March 6, 2014 Pompidou Centre Paris, Architects, Building, Photos, Exhibition, Design, Images Pompidou Centre Architecture Richard Rogers / Renzo Piano building, Paris, France 28 May 2012 Exhibition La Tendenza 20 Jun – 10 Sep 2012 11 am – 9 pm First retrospective in France dedicated to one of the later formation of the architecture of the postwar, from

 Italy, “The Tendenza, Italian Architecture, 1965-1985” presents a selection of over 250 drawings, models, photographs, paintings, films, and a very rich literature.

photo : Michael Hierner The exhibition traces the highlights of the movement which Aldo Rossi was the leader. Rejecting the notion of avant-garde utopia and to initiate a political architecture and critical engagement with reality, the Tendenza is a new approach of the architectural project based on a revival of the drawing and image. Centre Pompidou Colour-Coded External Services: © David Noble 21 May 2010 Pompidou Centre Building Photos by Rebecca Lomholt Breun of Center Pompidou’s intriguing homage to the new building in Metz: photographs © Rebecca Breun Centre Pompidou-Metz , France – opened May 2010 Shigeru Ban, architect Pompidou Centre / Centre George Pompidou, Paris IVe 1976 Renzo Piano Building Workshop - Projects - Selected Projects Jerome L. Greene Science Center for Mind Brain Behavior 2007-in progress Jerome L. Greene Science Center for Mind Brain Behavior, New York, U.S.A Renzo Piano Building Workshop teamed up with SOM on the master plan of Columbia University’s new Manhattanville Campus.

The first phase of the Harlem development is on site, and will include four buildings designed by RPBW: the Jerome L. Greene Science Center, the Lenfest Center for the Arts, the Forum, and the School of International and Public Affairs. Columbia University has always been an urban institution. The new campus will be a place of research and knowledge production integrated with the city, in close contact with its social reality, street culture and energy. The Whitney Museum at Gansevoort 2007-2015 The Whitney Museum at Gansevoort, New York, U.S.A The Whitney Museum is building itself a new home in downtown Manhattan’s Meatpacking District. Opened on May 1st, 2015, the project substantially enlarges the Whitney’s exhibition and programming space, enabling the first comprehensive view of the Museum’s growing collection, which today comprises more than 19,000 works of modern and contemporary American art. Harvard Art Museums renovation and expansion 2006-2014 Harvard Art Museums renovation and expansion, Cambridge, MA, U.S.A Harvard University’s three art museums – the Fogg, the Busch-Reisinger and the Arthur M.

Sackler – are being consolidated into one reorganized and upgraded facility, Harvard Art Museums, on the current site of the Fogg Museum on Quincy Street. The restored historic courtyard of the Fogg Museum will be at the heart of 200,00 sq. ft (18,500 sq.m) of new museum space. Pathé Foundation 2006-2014 Pathé Foundation, Paris, France The art of inserting a new building into an historic city block means engaging in an open, physical dialogue with the existing city buildings. Building onto a structure also presents an opportunity for a wideranging renovation project, a reclaiming of space. The new headquarters of the Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé is an unexpected presence, a curved volume glimpsed floating in the middle of a courtyard, anchored on just a few supports. It is complimented by a group of birch trees, a floral island set in the dense mineral context of the city. Kimbell Art Museum Expansion 2007-2013 Kimbell Art Museum Expansion, Fort Worth, U.S.A The Kimbell Art Museum’s original building was designed by Louis Kahn in 1972.

The new building by Renzo Piano Building Workshop was recently inaugurated and establishes a close, respectful and frank dialogue with this powerful yet delicate older building. The new Renzo Piano Pavilion (named by the building’s owner) accommodates the museum’s growing exhibition and education programmes, allowing the original Kahn building to revert to the display of the museum’s permanent collection. MUSE 2002-2013 MUSE Museo delle Scienze, Trento, Italy The Quartiere delle Albere district, the site of a former Michelin factory, is now a new part of the city of Trento. This transformed post-industrial brownfield site now shares many characteristics with Trento’s urban fabric – the clear hierarchy of the design, its functional stratification and an overall similarity in the size of buildings and materials used for their construction. This urban renewal project has reconnected the city to its natural context, which in Trento is defined by the nearby Adige River and Monte Bondone. This new district, for a long time physically separated from the city centre by the railway, now feels psychologically closer. Quartiere delle Albere is home to MuSe, the new Science Museum, serving to reinforce the cultural identity of this area of Trento.

Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art 2006-2012 Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway Tjuvholmen is a new cultural quarter located to the south-west of Oslo’s city centre. Integrating art and leisure, the complex combines the Astrup Fearnley Museum and an office building, with a new public sculpture park, swimming beach and waterside promenade. As a continuation of the redevelopment of the Aker Brygge area of the city, site of former shipyards, Tjuvholmen has a privileged location right on the water’s edge, with views out over the fjord and back to the city centre. Auditorium del Parco 2010-2012 Auditorium del Parco, L'Aquila, Italy The Auditorium in L’Aquila was built as a temporary substitute to replace the Castello Spagnolo concert hall, gravely damaged in the 2009 earthquake. A group of three cubes, it is a simple design that tests the efficiency and expressiveness of spaces that were generated by need and necessity. Claudio Abbado proclaimed it “a building of great symbolic value”.

He was one of the first people to realise that it could be a very long time before the city would be back to normal and that building a place to protect musical traditions would be a positive way to start the healing process. Renovation and expansion of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum 2005-2012 Renovation and expansion of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, U.S.A Boston’s original Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum opened in 1903 at Fenway Court, a Venetian-style palazzo built by the patroness to showcasehouse her substantial collection of over 2,500 works of fine and decorative art, including tapestries, furniture, manuscripts and textiles, from Europe, Asia, the Islamic world and America. London Bridge Tower 2000-2012 London Bridge Tower, London, United Kingdom The London Bridge Tower, also known as the Shard, is a 72-storey, mixed-use tower located beside London Bridge Station on the south bank of the river Thames. This project was a response to the urban vision of London Mayor Ken Livingstone and to his policy of encouraging high-density development at key transport nodes in London.

This sort of sustainable urban extension relies on the proximity of public transportation, discourages car use and helps to reduce traffic congestion in the city. Ronchamp Gatehouse and Monastery 2006-2011 Ronchamp Gatehouse and Monastery, Ronchamp, France The Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp was designed by Le Corbusier and is one the 20th-century’s most important works of architecture. For years now it has been a heavily frequented site of international cultural tourism, so much so that the site needed urgent attention in order to restore the spirtual and religious dimension originally intended for Ronchamp by its architect. In a wider effort to improve the area, the Œuvre Notre Dame du Haut commissioned Renzo Piano Building Workshop to design a convent for the Poor Clare sisters, as well as a small new building to welcome visitors, the Porterie. Hugging the hill’s slope, the new buildings are protected architecture with a resolved interior featuring large picture windows that frame the woods and its light. Central St. Giles Court Mixed-use Development 2002-2010 Central St.

Giles Court Mixed-use Development, London, United Kingdom Situated between Covent Garden and New Oxford Street in central London, the Central St Giles development replaces a massive, unloved, impenetrable block of former government offices, with a permeable, vibrant, sculptural mix of volumes containing offices, apartments, restaurants and retail. Central St Giles fits well with its urban context, responding to the shapes and colours that surround it. California Academy of Sciences 2000-2008 California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, U.S.A Designing a great cultural and scientific institution in San Francisco, a city with a strong collective vocation for the environment, also meant finding a language that expressed this shared vision of the present in an immediate way. Through the evocative spaces of the Museum of Natural History, the large green roof that breathes and the successful coexistence of outreach activities and research, the new headquarters of the California Academy of Sciences wanted, using architecture, to convey their passion for knowledge of nature and the fact that the earth is fragile.

Chicago Art Institute – The Modern Wing 2000-2009 Chicago Art Institute – The Modern Wing, Chicago, U.S.A The Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago, a 25,000 sq m expansion that houses collections of European contemporary art, also unifies and completes the cultural and urban campus of the Art Institute. The New York Times Building 2000-2007 The New York Times Building, New York, U.S.A A new headquarters for the “New York Times” newspaper was commissioned via invited competition in 2000. Renzo Piano Building Workshop’s winning design opens up a neglected corner of Manhattan opposite the Port Authority, with a 52-storey building whose themes of permeability and transparency express the intrinsic link between the newspaper and the city. Renovation and Expansion of the Morgan Library 2000-2006 Renovation and Expansion of the Morgan Library, New York, U.S.A Creating additional space for the Morgan Library in the heart of Manhattan was a particular challenge. This elegant group of buildings, a ‘village of memory’ is surrounded by the dense urban fabric of New York City, a seemingly solid physical barrier around the site.

Rather than building upwards, Renzo Piano Building Workshop decided to dig downwards into the hard rock to build a sort of underground vault in which to house the library’s rare book collection. With surgical precision, new steel and glass units were inserted in and amongst the existing buildings. Maison Hermès 1998-2006 Maison Hermès, Tokyo, Japan Celebrated French fashion house Hermès commissioned Renzo Piano to design a building for their Japanese headquarters in 1998. Its location at the heart of Tokyo’s densely built, neon-lit Ginza shopping district, and the stringent building regulations regarding earthquakes and fire, have influenced a compact and unique building with a distinctive glass facade. The building contains a shop, offices, an exhibition space and access to the underground station below Harumi Avenue. High Museum Expansion 1999-2005 High Museum Expansion, Atlanta, U.S.A The High Museum was founded in 1905 and was then expanded by Richard Meier in 1983.

To respond to the fast growth of its art collections and the increasing number of visitors, the museum decided on a new expansion programme, which would almost double the museum’s surface area, up to 312,000 sq ft. Zentrum Paul Klee 1999-2005 Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Switzerland The complex nature of the shapes and articulations of the body of work of German-Swiss artist Paul Klee is reflected in the architecture of the Zentrum. The museum is part and parcel of the rolling hills and blends in with the natural landscape of the countryside outside of Bern. Its curved roof made of long steel beams welded together one by one, houses one of the most extensive monographic collections in the world. Lingotto Factory Conversion 1983-2003 Lingotto Factory Conversion, Torino, Italy Built in the 1920s for Fiat, Lingotto was the largest and most modern car manufacturing plant in Europe, both architecturally and in terms of car production. The 500m-long, five-storey building, had a volume of one million cubic metres, and was equipped with a rooftop test track.

Lingotto was the first example of modular construction in reinforced concrete, based on the repetition of three elements: pillars, beams and floors. The factory was closed in 1982. In 1984, Fiat S.p.A. announced a competition and, in 1985, commissioned the Renzo Piano Building Workshop to convert the building. The project aimed to revive the building by transforming it into a multipurpose centre while maintaining its architectural identity. Potsdamer Platz 1992-2000 Potsdamer Platz, Berlin, Germany Following a competition won in 1992, the dormant wasteland of Potsdamer Platz in the newly reunified capital of Germany, Berlin, was entirely renovated based on an Renzo Piano Building Workshop-designed masterplan. It wasn’t long before the new architecture and fresh vitality triggered by this mixed-use development gave the entire area a new inner energy, reconnecting areas of the city long separated by the Berlin wall. This new centre is defined by two environmental features typical of the Berlin urban scene: green space and water.

Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Center 1991-1998 Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Center, Noumea, New Caledonia Erected in honour of the New Caledonian political leader assassinated in 1989, the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre pays homage to Kanak culture and draws on local building traditions and expertise by intertwining the ancient and the modern. Beyeler Foundation Museum 1992-1997 Beyeler Foundation Museum, Riehen, Switzerland The Beyeler Foundation museum came into being when arts patron and collector Ernst Beyeler decided to share his extraordinary art collection with the public. It was built in the park of the 18th-century Villa Berower, which houses the museum’s offices and a restaurant. Beyeler wanted the art to be lit entirely by natural light and the museum to be immersed in the surrounding greenery. Kansai International Airport Terminal 1988-1994 Kansai International Airport Terminal, Osaka, Japan Kansai airport is located on a specially built island in the Bay of Osaka.

The terminal is 1.7km long, with 42 boarding gates, and can handle 100,000 passengers a day. Its long and light structure was designed to withstand the violent earthquakes that often affect this region of Japan. The Menil Collection 1982-1986 The Menil Collection, Houston, U.S.A The museum houses the art collection of Dominique and John de Menil – more than 10,000 works of ancient, African and surrealist modern art. Apart from the spaces dedicated to these works, the building also houses a picture frame workshop and a studio for art restoration and study. The pavilion has more than 2,800 sq m of galleries and public space. Located in the park of a 1920’s residential neighbourhood, the museum building has the same proportions and uses the same building materials as the surrounding houses. IBM Travelling Pavillion 1983-1986 IBM Travelling Pavillion, Paris, France In 1983, IBM devised a travelling exhibition to promote advances in computer technology for telecommunications.

Reinforcing their message that workstations could be virtually located anywhere, this temporary structure was designed to be assembled, exhibit for a month, and then dismantled at each of its 20 European destinations including Lyon, London, Rome, Milan… Centre Georges Pompidou 1971-1977 Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France An immediate architectural icon of Paris, the Centre national d’art et de culture Georges-Pompidou (Centre Pompidou, or Beaubourg) is a vast multidisciplinary structure, a culture factory that preserves and exhibits important modern art collections. It is a place where the many strands of contemporary culture intertwine: art, design, literature, music and cinema. The centre is like a huge spaceship made of glass, steel and coloured tubing that landed unexpectedly in the heart of the Paris, and where it would very quickly set deep roots. Otranto Urban Regeneration Workshop 1979 Otranto Urban Regeneration Workshop, Otranto, Italy The Laboratorio di Quartiere, or District Workshop, was a UNESCO-supported project aimed at the renovation of historic town centres through a mechanism to safeguard their physical aspect: a permanent worksite.

The project in Otranto was used to test the feasibility of using local artisans to restore an ancient town centre. The plan allowed residents to remain in their homes and actively participate in the restoration work, thanks to the use of compact, non-invasive and innovative technology. Although the workshop left the town once its mission had been completed, as an independent studio, its work could continue as a travelling model to be adapted based on its sensitivity to the context in which it was activated. The concept of building on what is already there, of being willing to listen, and patiently renovating and repairing the fabric of a town is an idea which is just as valid today for the outskirts of a town as its centre.

Question: Which building in Paris did Richard Rogers and Enzo Piano design?
Answer: THE POMPIDOU CENTRE